New IIT admission system excellent, says Tharoor

New Delhi: Minister of State for Human Resource Development Shashi Tharoor on Wednesday said that the new system for admission to IITs which takes into account school board exam marks is a good system for fair comparison of different school boards.

"Percentiles are a good basis of comparing different boards and they are non-discriminatory," Tharoor said in a written reply to the Lok Sabha.

"They take into account the variations in examinations conducted by different boards. Based on this year's examination data, the cut-off percentile score for top 20 percentile varies from one board to another. Since different boards evaluate differently, percentiles have been used to ensure a fair comparison of students belonging to different boards," Tharoor said.

Explaining the new system of admission to the IITs, the minister said that in the new scheme of the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) (Advanced), only the top 1.5 lakh candidates (including all categories) based on their performance in the JEE (Main) qualify to appear in the JEE (Advanced) examination.

The admissions to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are based only on their category-wise all India rank in JEE (Advanced), subject to the condition that such candidates are in the top 20 percentile of successful candidates in class 12 examinations conducted by their respective boards in applicable categories.

The admission to the National Institutes of Technology (NITs) are based on combined merit list created by giving 40 percent weightage for performance in class 12 Board marks normalized on percentile basis with the remainder 60 percent weightage for performance in the JEE (Main).

This system has been applied uniformly to all the candidates, and, therefore, the chances of students getting affected does not arise, he said.